The CID – centre for innovation and design at Grand-Hornu aims to promote contemporary design through a programme of exhibitions and mediation activities, highlighting innovation, experimental research, the emergence of new themes and horizons for research in design, architecture and graphic art. By presenting the diversity of these creative domains, the CID raises the public’s awareness of a culture of design and architecture. It questions, studies and explains this culture through a dialogue with creators, researchers and also the public.
The central value of innovation at the CID is understood as a departure from our habitual ways of seeing, thinking and working. To innovate is to accept change. It is about reaching into the shock zone described by Raymond Loewy in Never Leave Well Enough Alone, breaking out of our certitudes and comfort zone to incorporate innovation into our daily lives.
The CID aims to reflect our current society, by programming and producing three to five exhibitions each year, On the one hand, they echo individual practices and research through monograph exhibitions dedicated to Belgian or international designers, and on the other, thematic exhibitions develop a narrative thread that invites us to dream up and invent utopias. An entire mediation programme is organised around the exhibitions to enable these discoveries to be shared with the public, specialist or otherwise, attaching great importance to the adaptation of our visits and visitors).